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Finnish Highlander? Again?

Started by Dreamer, 22-01-2010, 10:12:00 PM

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Dreamer

It's not only combo decks that utilize the graveyard: Loam decks make good use of it, too. And the Highlander mulligan helps as well: You can throw graveyard hate away if you know you're not playing against combo, or try to dig for more hate cards with it. As far as graveyward hate goes, we now have enchantments (Leyline, Planar Void), instants that can be played for free (Ravenous Trap), cheap and free artifact hate (Relic of Progenitus, Tormod's Crypt), cheap and free creatures that can hate the graveyard (Yixlid Jailer, Faerie Macabre), and Worldwake is even bringing us a common land that kills a graveyard when it's played. On top of that we have exiling removal like Swords, Path and Oblivion Ring. The hate is pretty easily integrated into a deck without hurting it too much, IMHO.

Tiggupiru

Quote from: Payron on 23-01-2010, 06:02:37 PMWell just wanted to mention that the Ghoul Deck which won 1 GP was also played around 1 combo piece and was a straight lose to Graveyard removel and pointremovel, but anyways this deck won a GP and rushed trough the top 8 and I also played on this GP and would of say in the top 8 were no bad players. I was thinkin galso about the points to solve the problems of some combo decks by there own ... but all this 2 card combos or can jut mass solutions and counters and outplay every aggro Deck with it. just makes no sense with aggro to play 5+ graveyard hate cards because it just makes the deck alot worse about any anti aggro deck.
I like all the combo bans and I trust the concil with it. Anyways I am not sure about LoA because on the GP for example I would never play my Survival-deck just because I doesn t own a LoA and my aggro deck is nearly perfect, because there is no dought that LoA as starting land wins mirrors!

All right. Couple of issues here. The said deck is somewhat similar to the supposed Buried Alive deck would look like. However, that deck was more like a hybrid consisting of three different combos. Not to mention each of them is way batter than Buried Alive and they are banned for a good reason. Let's have a look at these combos:

1) Hermit Druid functioned as a one man combo, one activation dumped all cards in your deck to your graveyard and then you just dread returned big sutured ghoul with haste(provided by Dragon Breath. The flashback cards that create creatures (and narcomoeba) allowed you to meet the three creature quota required to flashback dread return for a hasty, fast kill.

2) The above could also be accomplished via targeting Cephalid Illusionist with Shuko or Nomads en-Kor.

3) Painter's Servant and Grindstone provided a cheap and colorless combo to deck the opponent, or to dump your deck to the graveyard. This also ignores any possible graveyard hate you might have.

Buried Alive - combo requires you to find Buried Alive. This is important, as there are no alternative routes to take like the deck you mentioned. This clearly makes the combo much less consistent. Also drawing any of the offending creatures makes comboing impossible unless you find a way to discard them. On the bright side, you have plethora of reanimate spells to get the combo rolling and as luck would have it, the best ones are on the same color like Buried Alive. This might make the deck too powerful, but I would like it to be proven by players rather than assuming the players are unable to adapt properly.

Now, you seem to be worried about your aggro deck being weakened if you add in some GY hate. This is called metagaming and it is quite a large part of the Magic. You might need to devote cards that makes you better against your bad matchups and thus weaken your good matchups. This also might make some deck unattractive if you are expecting many of its bad matchups to be played.

Mythrandir

QuoteNow, you seem to be worried about your aggro deck being weakened if you add in some GY hate. This is called metagaming and it is quite a large part of the Magic. You might need to devote cards that makes you better against your bad matchups and thus weaken your good matchups. This also might make some deck unattractive if you are expecting many of its bad matchups to be played.

The problem is not adding GY hate, is getting GY hate in the first couple of turns, otherwise you're dead, and this is not metagaming.

Don't take me wrong, although i'm not a combo player, combo decks should be allowed for a healthy meta and they are: we've seen quite some very interesting and good builds here in our league: alluren, heartbeat variants, etc. And they had some nice results and, IMHO, these decks aren't play as much because they are really hard to pilot as oppose to a straight painter + stone combo and sometimes unfun to play "VS" and "with".

Tiggupiru

Quote from: Mythrandir on 23-01-2010, 10:55:28 PM
QuoteNow, you seem to be worried about your aggro deck being weakened if you add in some GY hate. This is called metagaming and it is quite a large part of the Magic. You might need to devote cards that makes you better against your bad matchups and thus weaken your good matchups. This also might make some deck unattractive if you are expecting many of its bad matchups to be played.

The problem is not adding GY hate, is getting GY hate in the first couple of turns, otherwise you're dead, and this is not metagaming.

This is a valid point if you are expecting a lot of extended dredge to show up for your highlander tournament. In order to Buried Alive to win as soon as possible it pretty much needs to take an extremely aggressive approach and play every tutor it can find. This probably puts the average combo turn somewhere around 5 or 6, where turn 4 is not unheard of. This would still be a problem if only cards capable to stopping it were GY hate. This is not the case. Here is a list that mess up with the combo:

- Any instant burn spell that deals at least two damage to a creature. Even like evoking a Cloudthresher is enough. If the deck is using Pestermite over Sky Hussar, one damage is enough to delay the combo for a turn

- Any instant removal that can kill a two toughness creature

- Any bounce spell that can bounce a creature

- Any counterspell

- GY hate

- Pithing Needle, Stifle, Humility... list goes on


The only deck, that I can think of, that has only a few of the above answers is WW. And if that is a problem, you really should pick another deck. Granted, WW can still win quicker than the combo player.

Quote from: Mythrandir on 23-01-2010, 10:55:28 PMDon't take me wrong, although i'm not a combo player, combo decks should be allowed for a healthy meta and they are: we've seen quite some very interesting and good builds here in our league: alluren, heartbeat variants, etc. And they had some nice results and, IMHO, these decks aren't play as much because they are really hard to pilot as oppose to a straight painter + stone combo and sometimes unfun to play "VS" and "with".

Aluren is not deemed as a problem, and it really shouldn't. But why buried alive is? The average combo turn is probably somewhat faster with the BA -deck but Aluren is immune to GY hate and bounce. At a certain point, it is immune to instant speed removal, if you only have one.

so_not

We discussed about this a little with Nastaboi yesterday at gpt. We are under such impression that the ultimate goal of this project is to get this format an official status preferably supported by WotC. Two main goals should therefore be:
1. To follow DCI ban policy
2. To use rules that are DCI legitimate.

Banning policy change would definately lead into banhammering of several cards that are now legal (library, mind twist, demonic tutor etc.).

The second goal would include banning of CE and gold-bordered cards. This would allow highlander tournaments to be sanctioned as casual non-rated events. This would give the tournament organizers a little bit of prize support but also would make these tournaments visible in the DCI database so that they would see that this format is played a lot.

Sturmgott

#20
Quote from: so_not on 24-01-2010, 11:27:28 AM
We discussed about this a little with Nastaboi yesterday at gpt. We are under such impression that the ultimate goal of this project is to get this format an official status preferably supported by WotC. Two main goals should therefore be:
1. To follow DCI ban policy
2. To use rules that are DCI legitimate.

Banning policy change would definately lead into banhammering of several cards that are now legal (library, mind twist, demonic tutor etc.).

The second goal would include banning of CE and gold-bordered cards. This would allow highlander tournaments to be sanctioned as casual non-rated events. This would give the tournament organizers a little bit of prize support but also would make these tournaments visible in the DCI database so that they would see that this format is played a lot.

While I agree that it would be a great thing if WotC introduced Highlander as an official format, I see tremendous drawbacks in that. Several hundreds if not thousands of players have bought IE/CE duals for a payable access to our format. Should these cards become illegal all of a sudden, most of these players wouldn't have any or at least enough duals to continue playing their decks and thus would rather quit playing HL than invest another 500 â,¬ for whitebordered duals whose look is hard to stand in an otherwise blackbordered deck. If you want them blackbordered, we all know that only the Underground Sea will cost at least 110 â,¬. Also I cannot see why CE/IE cards in a casual tournament format like HL should be disallowed. They are still cards printed by WotC. In other formats like Vintage TOs go the other way around: They allow proxies to be played, resulting in tournaments that can no longer be sanctioned. DCI sanctioning is nothing that has a real value for most HL players, being able to play the cards they bought to be able to play it on the other side has alot of value for them!

The second downside is the mulligan. I wouldn't want to play HL with a DCI-style mulligan any more and would never agree to drop the Spoils Mulligan. While surely an official DCI-HL would attract alot of new players, it would screw most long-time-supporters who brought the format where it is right now.

Also, I do not agree with the DCIs banning policy. The primary focus of a banning policy in HL should always be to increase diversity and interaction while on the other hand keeping the list of banned cards as short as possible. If a very powerful card does not negatively affect this balance and diversity, but rather increase it, it should imho be allowed.

Another word to "I would like to see players prove a combo to be too good". This is exactly what we want to prevent. I explained the reasons for this in this thread already, I'll copy it here for easier reference:

"We introduced pre-emptive banning as a result of two Highlander Grand Prix being dominated by combo decks, one by TPS, the other by Flash-Hulk. It takes alot of time and effort to prepare a GP, it takes people alot of time and effort to prepare and attend a GP. We owe them and the tournament organizers to prevent experiences like those!"

We had 6 HL GPs in Germany so far. 3 of them were dominated or at least won by a combo deck. People travel some hundred kilometers and what they keep in memory in these cases is that HL is a combo format. We don't want that. We want combo to be a part of HL, but we don't want tier 1 pure combo decks and we're dedicated to that promise.

so_not

#21
Quote from: Sturmgott on 24-01-2010, 03:16:12 PM
Thousands of players have bought IE/CE duals for a payable access to our format. Should these cards become illegal all of a sudden, most of these players wouldn't have any or at least enough duals to continue playing their decks (me e.g.) and thus would rather quit playing HL than invest another 500 â,¬ for whitebordered duals whose look is hard to stand in an otherwise blackbordered deck. If you want them blackbordered, we all know that only the Underground Sea will cost at least 110 â,¬.

I bet my ass off that there are not thousands of those who have CE duals for highlander use. Real duals can be used in other formats so why not invest in them? You can always get your money back. And if you really don't want to, maybe someone of those thousands can borrow you the missing real one for a tournament and you can just use your proxy other times at your kitchen table. And what the hell? You are pimping your deck with proxies because they look cool? Revised/UL duals speed up games because they can be fetched way more faster than their BB counterparts. Really the look of cards should not be an issue when you think about a format. That is just stupid.

Quote from: Sturmgott on 24-01-2010, 03:16:12 PM
Also I cannot see why CE/IE cards in a casual tournament format like HL should be disallowed. They are still cards printed by WotC. In other formats like Vintage TOs go the other way around: They allow proxies to be played, resulting in tournaments that can no longer be sanctioned.

I see you didn't quite get my point. Vintage is already a well-known format. It doesn't need WotC support. This is a growing format. To make WotC have any interest in it, they should first see that it is played by the WPN rules and that the playerbase is already large. Do you even know what is WPN or casual non-rated events? In small countries like Finland it is important that every event is recorded so that we don't lose our precious PT-slots, it affects our product prices and whatnot. Maybe we would even get another GP some year if enough tournaments were recorded.

Quote from: Sturmgott on 24-01-2010, 03:16:12 PM
DCI sanctioning is nothing that has a real value for most HL players, being able to play the cards they bought to be able to play it on the other side has alot of value for them!

WPN would give TOs prize support and I guess that would attract some players.

Quote from: Sturmgott on 24-01-2010, 03:16:12 PM
The second downside is the mulligan. I wouldn't want to play HL with a DCI-style mulligan any more and would never agree to drop the Spoils Mulligan. While surely an official DCI-HL would attract alot of new players, it would screw most long-time-supporters who brought the format where it is right now.

WPN rules doesn't affect the mulligan rule. I wouldn't like this format if the mulligan rule was changed either.

Quote from: Sturmgott on 24-01-2010, 03:16:12 PM
Also, I do not agree with the DCIs banning policy.

This is again just absurd. Other people have already commented your banning policy enough.

Everything you say or do contradicts with the facts about what should be made to have german highlander internationally recognized or WotC supported. Do you even really want it? If not then I will be glad to start promoting a new format with the mulligan rule, without proxies and without Mind Twist/LoA in Finland/rest of the world.

Mythrandir

First and foresmot we should come to terms to fact that no matter how many different rules, no matter how many different ban lists, we will never satisfy 100% of the players. That's a fact and not an opinion.

As for things like CE allowed not allowed, until it temains a casual format i don't think this have a huge impact on our format, and if WOTC starts Highlander as an official format we can shout we can cry but they will do as whatever they pleased, so it's not very useful, IMO, to discuss these little details.

As for the ban list, again, never will we satisfy all players. I don't agree 100% with the current ban list (just as i sometimes don't agree with WOTC bannings and rules change), but i think our current list is quite satisfactory and i'm pleased with the meta diversity and outcomes, so i can't really complain.

One last thing: if the highlander community starts to split, we will all lose. That's just my opinion.

imppu

#23
Sorry to say, but it seems like this split is unavoidable. The council fails to even concider that something they are doing could be done better. To me it sounds that they like the format the way it is and it will not be changed. They would be keeping it this way even if most of the community would like to see it changed. All your responces are just statements that you are right. Not even once I have seen you concidering you might have done something wrong. It's not healthy for Highlander. If you want to keep the format like this among friends, please don't dream on making it international or WOTC regogniced.

Mythrandir

Quote from: imppu on 24-01-2010, 09:31:18 PM
Sorry to say, but it seems like this split is unavoidable. The council fails to even concider that something they are doing could be done better. To me it sounds that they like the format the way it is and it will not be changed. They would be keeping it this way even if most of the community would like to see it changed. All your responces are just statements that you are right. Not even once I have seen you concidering you might have done something wrong. It's not healthy for Highlander. If you want to keep the format like this among friends, please don't dream on making it international or WOTC regogniced.

First, let me clarify one thing: I'm not, nor i was i, ever in the highlander council! I'm from Portugal, so whether this format originated in germany or finland, for me it's the same. What i do think, it's despite sometimes the lack of response from the council, they have put a lot of effort in making this a better format. And yes, there are things that i don not like and things i'd change, but never the less i still appreciate their effort, a lot.

Sturmgott

#25
Quote from: imppu on 24-01-2010, 09:31:18 PM
Sorry to say, but it seems like this split is unavoidable. The council fails to even concider that something they are doing could be done better. To me it sounds that they like the format the way it is and it will not be changed. They would be keeping it this way even if most of the community would like to see it changed. All your responces are just statements that you are right. Not even once I have seen you concidering you might have done something wrong. It's not healthy for Highlander. If you want to keep the format like this among friends, please don't dream on making it international or WOTC regogniced.

The split is only unavoidable if some individuals invest all their energy in enforcing such a split, true. We never said we're making the best possible job, but growing player numbers, growing number of tournaments, a working and growing online league and community plus very diverse top 8's in several large-scale tournaments are in our opinion clear indicators that what we're doing is a) appreciated by alot of players and b) can't be that wrong.

For that "It's not healthy for highlander"-part: The clearly unhealthiest, if not lethal option, in my opinion is a split of the community. It simply is not large enough to survive that. It will result in Finland playing according to your rules, Germany according to ours. And every other country will be split up. We're willing to take a helpful position to avoid a split, but please understand that we cannot allow to be taken hostage this way.

As for that "please don't dream on making it internationally or WotC recognized"-part, it already is both. You cannot deny that it has become more and more international, and WotC has already twice written articles about our format. They even look at our banned list and decisions when developing Singleton.

Getting ahead

What is true nonetheless is the fact that the formation of the council has not yet reflected that internationalization. We are working on that and will soon give an official invitation. It's up to the Finnish community now to determine a person that is a) very competent and experienced in HL matters, b) has proven several years of constant dedication and love to Highlander, and c) is willing to invest enough time and effort as that is needed to maintain the format and, sometimes more important than that, keep the community together. In your own best interest it should also be someone who has good credits in your community. As you may understand though we cannot accept someone who has insulted us and discredited our work in an offending way in the past. Furthermore, we expect to see someone that also pursues the primary aim, to have ONE worldwide, unified Highlander format and community. Please discuss this in your community and tell us the result(s).

We're open to suggestions how an internationalized council could best do its job in terms of logistics.

Currently the council consists of:

Frank Topel (me, maintainer of the format since 1996, tournament organizer of 100+ HL tournaments and of 4 Highlander GPs, webmaster of Magicplayer.org, Highlandermagic.de and Highlandermagic.info)
Timo Barwisch (supports and spreads the format since the beginning of this millenium, has organized 5 Highlander GPs, a former North-Rhein-Westfalia Champion, Moderator of most German Forum Boards)
Gerry Stahl (HL tournament organizer for more than a decade and initiator of [HLL] international highlander league, moderator in most of the international boards of this forum, helped most in internationalizing the format this way)

It is very probable that there will be another German member soon. Patrick Richter really has earned a place not only for winning most German tournaments in the past 2 years but foremost for his proven insight into, love and dedication for the format. He also helped alot to aquire new players and spread the word.

The council also has a rather diffuse expanded circle of advisors, namely and most actively Hans-Joachim Höh and Falk Bernhardt, both (former) German pro players that know the game from its first days.

imppu

#26
Finally seems like something is happening. Thank you for that.

And Mythrandir; Never thought you were in the council.

EDIT:
Quote from: Sturmgott on 24-01-2010, 10:50:59 PM
The split is only unavoidable if some individuals invest all their energy in enforcing such a split, true.

For that "It's not healthy for highlander"-part: The clearly unhealthiest, if not lethal option, in my opinion is a split of the community.
It's funny that you still aren't taking any responsibility if the split would ever happen. It's not like anyone is doing it to "get to you". I will much rather see one good united format too. But it really started to seem you aren't willing to cooperate with anyone. But again I'm glad you are taking this step and we are getting heard now.

Vazdru

#27
Some remarks:

- banned list / mulligan

I can understand people quite well moaning about the banned list. Why? I wasn’t always in the HL council. In fact I’m a member for about now 1 (?!) year. Before that time I was debating a lot with the council. I felt misunderstood and sometimes unnoticed. I’ve thought I would understand the format after playing and organizing hl events that long. And I was sure that some of the things I wanted were absolutely right and easy to discover.

But I’ve had to learn that card discussions are a complicated thing because objective criteria are hard to determine.

I was against:

•   Spoils Mulligan -> why no Free Mulligan
•   Unbaning Survival of the Fittest -> it was 01.04. and I was playing a HL Tournament in Ludwigsburg and thought it would be a April’s Fool joke :-D (btw. Klaus Jöns won that tourney with Oath, places 2-4 were RDW)

And I wanted:

•   Gifts Ungiven to be banned (http://www.magicplayer.org/forum/index.php?topic=271.15)
•   Mind over Matters to be unbanned
•   Enlightened Tutor to be banned (because there were no clear guideline for banning / unbanning C1-tutors: Mystical, Vampiric and Enlightened)

and lot more. It took me hours to write down my reflections about the banned list  ;D In the end it was worth the effort, Sturmgott invited me to the inner circle although we've had some conflicting point of views.

It happens sometimes you have to recognize that not everything you firmly believe in for years is the absolute truth. Sometimes you have to recognize anyone else has been right. In retrospect i have to confess that I was wrong in my card-analytics in several cases and some of my current analysis probably wrong too.

Spoils Mulligan is a great achievement by the former hl council. I’ve playing Singleton weekly. And the biggest disadvantage is â€"apart from the banned list  ::)- the mulligan. The DCI do not care about the fact that imo ~ 10-20% of the Singleton-games mostly determined by the first 7 cards rather by Mulligan. They do not improve the rules for the characteristic of Singleton â€" but the hl council did so for Highlander.

One example: Modo first 7 cards: 7 Islands â€" LOL â€" Mulligan to six: 1 Land â€" 1 Manastone â€" down to 5? I tried and game over before it begun (missed two landdrops). With new hl Mulligan that kind of games in which you can’t do absolutely nothing are reduced to maybe 3-5%.

After more than 2.500 recorded hl games in the last 2-3 years, 1.300 of them played by myself some views have changed slightly, some drastically.

I do no longer want Gifts Ungiven gets the bannhammer. I understand your point but as long as Naya is the best deck around (it was place 1 already in my statistics before pyyhttu has won German Open 2010, http://www.magicplayer.org/forum/index.php?topic=273.30) i do not see the point why one of the key cards vs aggro should be banned actually at least when combo do not play a huge role anymore and aggro won the last two huge HL events (http://www.magicplayer.org/forum/index.php?topic=172.15). I don't believe anti-aggro decks get such a big boost because their prime-evil becomes weakened.

Like I’ve said I play Singleton for a while now. Gifts and Demonic are banned and Control and Combo are dead. Less than 2% are combo (I’ve seen one Enduring Ideal-dec), ~ 15% are control and the rest is aggro, mainly RDW (k â€" It’s cheap and some control-cards aren’t available or too expensive in Modo â€" but the banned-list is another reason for the horde of aggros). I don’t want such a scenario; I want that complex metagame like we have actually. In former times we’ve had already a GP with 3 RDWs (excactly same build except less than 10 cards) in the top 8 â€" I do not want that times come back again.

Sometimes you are right and as you see the council do not close itself off good reasoning. You can’t have everything now and here â€" sometimes you have to be a bit patient. I’m pretty sure that the banned list will be optimized more and more in the future - hopefully with international / Finnish support!

K â€" I understand the point that the banned-list looks strange for a guy with an out-side view. It’s always hard to explain why Mystical and Enlighted are banned but Demonic is not  :) And that we have overpowered cards like Survival and Gifts still in this format - but sometimes specially that overpowered cards are supporting a healthy meta. Like i've said before - every ban has two sides of a coin.

Not everyone in the council has the same point of view how to develop the banned list but is like in a good soccer team:

The discussions are left internal. Outwards we demonstrate closeness. :D

And all decisions are backed always by all council members.


- Gold cards / CE / ICE

Sorry this wouldn’t be worth a single word imo it’s just a secondary area of conflict. There are vintage tournaments with proxies and there are vintage tournaments w/o any. So if your Finnish TO do not allow gold cards in his local tournament â€" so what? The HL council won’t send him into exile  ;) If we allow them on next GP in May â€" so what? I can’t see the point how people can argue about that silly thing. Don’t get me wrong â€" I do not want to be offending â€" it’s just a lack of understanding on my side. Btw. I know some regional TOs who organized HL Tournaments in the context of Gateway, CE/ICE were allowed. I’m not absolutely sure but I believe it’s already possible to have our HL-format in “DCI-clothes”  ;) Correct me if I’m wrong.

And now enjoy looking for weaknesses or cross-purposes in my explanations and slam me hard  ;)
Far below the earth
Where the demons hunt the souls of those that sleep
In the city of the Vazdru and the Drin
Where the black flame burns inside the palace fountain.

MMD

I finally made it into the international forum as I see a "Storm" in front us   ;)  Sry

I highly appreciate the work of the council/innovators/advisors of the Highlander format in the same way I sometimes doom the inflexibility and obstinacy of their actions regarding the banned list and some other minor issues.

Highlander is on the edge to become a noticeable, international accepted format.

The main advantage of this format IS the spoils mulligan which allows us to PLAY our card game and not accept a game loss because of mana and/or colour screw like in other formats. I assume that without this mulligan rule Highlander would have died long time ago.
The spoils mulligan changes the rules of this card game dramatically which leads to a complete different deck construction and game strategy. This huge difference will never be accepted from WotC at all and therefore it will be impossible to find total acceptance for this format as most of the players will only accept to play official formats/rules.

However, there is a fair amount of Highlander players in Finland and Germany and it is possible to “infect” more players in our countries to establish a noteworthy tournament scene even without being an official format. I do not mind to play an unofficial format as long as this is the most fun one for me. I have talked to players with laughed about Highlander (especially about our banned list) in the beginning and loved to play it after a couple of test games.

For example: A friend of mine, who is former MtG Team World Champion will attend some of the Iserlohn tournaments this year as he really enjoys to play Highlander now. We also played some Highlander with Jan Ruess on Worlds in Rome and he has enjoyed as well. My local community comes Standard, Legacy, Vintage and Casual; so there is no restriction of possible future Higlander players. Go out and enlighten the unbelievers!

If we can establish a bigger tournament scene we will also receive more feedback regarding the current banned list but also regarding the time limit, the CE cards and other open issues. We need to question the rules on a bigger platform to define the most suitable rules for this game.

As long as there is a local community which decides about what is right or wrong the community will stay local. This will lead to a split of the current community into German and Non-German players. I am German but I certainly also question some of the decisions of the council and question if they really care what the community wants the format to be.

By the way, I wonder how the council/advisors can make decisions without attending the “biggest” tournaments in their area (Iserlohn/Duelmen) as playing on the kitchen (or pub) table with the same guys will not be enough for a correct evaluation.

I was delighted to see a lot of Finnish players attending the tournament in Frankfurt this January and I hope to see them again on May 22nd to attend
the HLGP VII again. Perhaps there are also some players from Portugal and other countries, then.  ;D

My demand to the council is to adopt and implement the requirement of the community, not on a local, not on a national but on an international basis. We need to use the tools of this forum to collect tournament data but also individual opinions in this forum to make optimal rule decisions and improve and promote this format.

Just my 20cents…
Feel free to browse through my MKM account:

http://www.magickartenmarkt.de/index.php?mainPage=showSellerChart&idInfoUser=13199

I also have a huge amount of chinese and japanese foil HL staples not listed yet,  which I would like to downgrade to english foil. Just let me know!

so_not

Quote from: Vazdru on 26-01-2010, 01:18:48 AM
I do no longer want Gifts Ungiven gets the bannhammer...

Neither do I demand it when there are other more blatantly overpowered and stupid cards not banned. And what comes to the aggrodominance, I can give multiple reasons why aggro decks in general tend to do well in this format:
1. Decks are more consistent by default (only having one plan isn't very hard to build around)
2. Deck are easier to play about right (including mulligan decisions and such)
3. Cards are probably little easier to get
4. Games are faster (more time to think per turn -> less mistakes) also not so many ties
(5. The legality of Mind Twist, Library etc. does not make control better against aggro but it makes control mirrors awfully luck based.)

Quote from: Vazdru on 26-01-2010, 01:18:48 AM
Sorry this wouldn’t be worth a single word imo it’s just a secondary area of conflict. There are vintage tournaments with proxies and there are vintage tournaments w/o any. So if your Finnish TO do not allow gold cards in his local tournament â€" so what? The HL council won’t send him into exile  ;) If we allow them on next GP in May â€" so what? I can’t see the point how people can argue about that silly thing. Don’t get me wrong â€" I do not want to be offending â€" it’s just a lack of understanding on my side.

This is exactly what we are probably going to do. We'll encourage TOs to not allow them.

Quote from: Vazdru on 26-01-2010, 01:18:48 AM
Btw. I know some regional TOs who organized HL Tournaments in the context of Gateway, CE/ICE were allowed. I’m not absolutely sure but I believe it’s already possible to have our HL-format in “DCI-clothes”  ;) Correct me if I’m wrong.

Gateway doesn't exist any more. It was replaced by the WPN. By the WPN rules proxies are not allowed and CE/IE cards are considered proxies. These "DCI-clothes" are the casual non-rated events I have been talking about all the time.